A call center, also called a customer service center, refers to a system that synthetically utilizes advanced communication and computer technologies for optimizing and managing information and material flow. A call center can collectively achieve communication, service, and product guidance. A staff member of a call center is usually referred to as a customer service representative. A call center may include hundreds or even thousands of customer service representatives. A smaller more economic call center may include a much smaller number of customer service representatives. The size of a call center can be determined based on the needs of the business providing support.
A call center is beneficial for the following reasons. 1. User abilities: A user's listening and speaking abilities are need to be taken into consideration at the call center. This is true whether a caller is an elderly person or a child interacting with a human representative of interacting with an automated voice system. 2. Cost savings: A call center can collectively accomplish the transfer of voice and data. A user may simply acquire the data in by accessing a database via voice prompts. This effectively reduces the length of each phone call. Also, each customer service representative may be able to handle more phone calls in a limited time period, thereby significantly improving the efficiency of phone handling and the utilization ratio of the phone system. 3. Extended hours of operation: A call center is able to offer services continuously for 24 hours every day. This allows a user to obtain information quickly and efficiently through a telephone for solving a current problem. 4. Improving quality of customer service: A call center has a user-friendly interface that can offer helpful customer service support. Due to the improvement of phone handling the time period that a user has to wait online is greatly reduced. As soon as a user call is received, a call center system can extract and send relevant information to a terminal of a customer service representative. This routing procedure can be based on the caller's number or the called number. Thus, a customer service representative obtains large amounts of relevant information related to the user, thereby simplifying the phone handling procedure.
Services provided by call centers are very important for corporations. However, these services generally remain labor intensive. Call centers employ more than 6 million people in North America alone and the number is expected to rise to 12 million by 2010. Even estimating the average yearly salary of an customer service representative of a call center as low as $20K results in over $120B/year is being spent on call center labor on average. For some large companies like International Business Machine (“IBM”) corporation, America, it may have more than 40,000 customer service representatives facing its customers through call centers. This represents an unacceptably high fraction of IBM's total employee population. According to the statistical information nearly 80-90% of the cost of call center based services is human labor cost. Current call center implementations have not provided a substantial reduction in costs.
Current call centers generally operate as follows. A user dials in and a customer service representative holds a conversation with the user. The customer service representative rapidly records the problem indicated by the user. According to the recorded problem, the representative gives a solution to the user or further researches the problem. For example, the representative can submit the support request a high-level department or forward it to a professional. Since the information recording is usually completed manually by a customer service representative, the integrity, continuity, and consistency of the recorded information cannot be guaranteed.
Thus, when the recorded information is forwarded to a professional, critical information may be missing or contain erroneous data. This can result in repetitive problem confirmation or a non-effective effort. Some call centers record a user's call during the entire transaction. However, the recordings are mainly used for monitoring the service of quality associated with customer service representatives and for serving as evidence in the case of a complaint. The recordings are not classified, retrieved, or combined for summarizing. Therefore, a call center implemented as such is not able to effectively reduce human labor cost and improve efficiency technically.
In another implementation of a call center, a user's call is recorded during the transaction and is then transcribed using speech-to-text technology. This may solve some of the problems of the previous example, but speech-to-text technologies, are unpredictable. The recognition error rate is extremely high, and the transcription accuracy is very low. This results in most of the transcribed text to be unreadable and not useful for customer service purposes.